Over the past few months, I’ve taken up the hobby of mushroom hunting and identification. This has caused quite the few people to scratch their heads, not excluding my neighbor who recently inquired about the “indoor greenhouse” I had setup in my basement to look like a lab of some sort. Once I explained to him that my little operation was for growing shiitake mushrooms, he was actually quite intrigued.

So why mushrooms and why now? Well, I’ve always been curious about how mushrooms grew and if it were possible to grow your own. I knew that it wasn’t going to be easy; otherwise more people would have done it. How many times have you gone over to someone’s house and noticed a mushroom growing in the window?

But alas, I did some googling and ended up finding two major resources that made me realize growing mushrooms was possible: http://www.mushroomvideos.com/ and http://www.shroomery.org.

Mushroomvideos.com outlined something called the BRF/PF Tek (which stands for the Brown Rice Flower Technique) method of growing mushrooms. Using easily obtainable materials such as jars, ground brown rice flour and spores purchased from the internet, it seemed it was indeed possible to grow mushrooms at home.

So naturally, I ordered the necessary supplies and two books by Paul Stamets, the originator of many techniques for finding and growing various mushrooms – especially those that can be sold in markets.

In the meantime, while I work on trying to successfully grow my first mushroom (I’ve got beech and shiitakes incubating), I’ve been going on periodic mushroom hunts in the Storer Convervation land, right next to the Robert Treat Paine Estate where I recently got married.

And after taking lots of pictures of my finds, I decided I would create a tumblelog for other amateur mycologists that post my pictures and pictures of the mushrooms from the community along with the best guess classification of the mushroom.

I don’t have a lot of time to devote to the site, much less any website outside of work, but tumblelogs are pretty easy to maintain and I figured this could help others identify their own mushrooms by comparing my photos with the mushroom they found.

You can find my site dedicated to mushroom identification here: http://www.shrooman.com/